When told of the offer, Mike Iavarone, co-president of IEAH Stables, replied, “I have a better offer. We’ll donate $250,000 to various charities if Curlin meets us in the Breeders’ Cup. These are the things we do anyway. We strongly feel that championships should be decided at the Breeders’ Cup and that in order to give both horses the proper time to prepare for each other, we believe the race we meet in should be on racing’s biggest stage. It also would allow horses from Europe an opportunity to race against us and prove who the best horse in the world is. You’re not going to prove it in a four-horse field in the Woodward. You’re going to prove it in a full field in the Breeders’ Cup. That’s where the champions have been decided almost every year.
“We have said all along that the Breeders’ Cup is the race we should all be meeting in and we’ll up their figure by five times. It’s unfortunate that Mr. Jackson would have to require our horse to run to make a charitable contribution. When you offer to make a donation to charity, it shouldn’t come from anywhere but the heart. We’ve made significant donations to various charities.
“Coming home from the Preakness at 5 oclock in the morning, we saw helicopters overhead on the Long Island Expressway, and the next morning I read a story about a Nassau County police officer, Ken Baribault, who was rear-ended by a drunk driver while he was arresting another drunk driver. He suffered serious injuries and went into a coma. The story was on the page right next to Big Brown. While we were prospering, he and his family were suffering, and I felt it was our duty as Nassau County residents to come to their aid. The idea we had was donate a percentage of the purse money in the Belmont, and we had his family come to the race. Unfortunately that didn’t work out. We then went to an event where they were promoting officer Baribault and we made a donation of $50,000 to his son for his scholarship foundation. Then we found out two weeks later that the officer had come out of his coma and was sent to a rehab center in New Jersey only 15 minutes from Monmouth Park. So we arranged for his whole family to come to the Haskell and donated a piece of the purse from the race so someone could stay with him until he can get back on his feet.
Why the need to brag about donations? That just takes away from the whole purpose of it...IMO
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